Newly approved wireless security related standards have already largely improved the robustness of wireless networks. However, these standards have a major drawback in common. That is, none of them provide an adequate solution to timely and automatically update the security profiles that are used in user authentication procedures in a wireless network.
In most enterprise wireless networks, the network administrator typically sets up a wireless security profile on both the client side and the wireless backend side (e.g., authenticators, RADIUS server, etc.) before delivering the client device to the wireless user. Later, if the administrator wants to update the security profile to improve overall robustness in the wireless network, he/she would have to update the security profile in both the wireless backend devices and the client devices. This would require that the administrator get the client devices back from the wireless users and manually update the security profiles. For a network with a relatively small number of wireless users, this approach is doable. However, for a large company with thousands of wireless users, this manual approach is a major undertaking. For this reason, the administrator may rarely update the wireless security profiles of wireless client devices. In addition, the wireless users are not able to update their own profiles. In the long run, these circumstances may lead to significant security problems that could benefit attackers and compromise the entire wireless network. There is a need for techniques and structures that simplify the process of updating security profiles on client devices in a wireless network.